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Show Weelklly Special & oTsPe"r!on Civil defense falls to budget ax ing and other vital services would' have been thrown into chaos if the bank had tolded. EXECUTIVE MEMO: The Reagan administration wants to cut the National Institute of Health's budget for research on cancer, heart disease and the causes of criminal behavior. The NTH budget grew from $4,495 billion for 1985, but the grants that would keep the vital research going face cuts in the 1986 budget. Congressional friends of NW hope they can mount a successful counterattack to the threatened cuts once the administration's final budget proposal is made public. The Internal Revenue Service is planning to conduct a comprehensive study of the threats and assaults against its employees, which have increased sharply in recent years. Between 1981 and 1983, the average annual number of threats and assaults was 485; 55 of these were serious physical attacks. In the first 11 months of 1984, the number totaled 728, of which 65 were serious attacks. The agency will try to develop a psychological profile of . taxpayers who are considered most likely to commit such offenses. Officials at the National Defense University recently dediced they needed a new war games center on their Fort McNair campus in southwest Washington, D.C., and they wanted it overnight. But the security-conscious academics wouldn't tell the Army Corps of , Engineers how big the center should , be. The officials also insisted that the , new center by supersecure, but no . details were give on grounds of national security. So the Engineers t went ahead by guess and by golly. I Result: The center will probably cost 1 at least twice as much as the i Pentagon's original $500,000 estimate. t Copyright, 1985, United Feature Syndicate, Inc. Washington In an abrupt turnaround, the White House has quietly abandoned its costly plans to make a nuclear war "survivable" by beefing up federal civil-defense programs, hi the 1986 budget, the Federal Emergency Management Agency budget for civil defense has been cut by at least one-third, to less than half what the agency had requested. Apparently the need for budgetary austerity has achieved what no amount of critical scorn could. The administration's ambitious plan to double the number of Americans who might live through a nuclear exchange drew ridicule from op-ftments, op-ftments, who say neither ..side will Survive a nuclear war,.;.'j 1v ,,,, r, The White House case wasn't helped any by administration officials offi-cials who suggested that the best defense against nuclear attack was a hole in the ground, and that everyone would survive if there were enough shovels to go around. A 1982 survey showed that the -public never swallowed the reassuring reassur-ing promises of survivability: Nearly half of those polled thought spending on civil defense was a waste of money. fn still-secret budget documents obtained by our associate Donald , Goldberg, the White House has bluntly ordered FEMA to "terminate the buildup in civil defense." FEMA asked for $284 million for civil defense in the 1986 budget a whopping increase over its $181 : million for the current fiscal year. I Instead, the budget will be cut to about $120 million. That would be the level of spending be; ore '. President Reagan announced his seven-year, $4.2 billion plan to strengthen civil defense. The timing of the decision to gut the civil-defense budget was surprising. surpris-ing. It came just before Secretary of State George Shultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko met for preliminary arms-control talks. Civil-defense expenditures have always been championed by the Reagan administration as a means of showing the Soviets we are determined not to back down in a nuclear face-off. The budget cut will atomize FEMA's grandiose plans to expand its bureaucratic empire. One project the taxpayers will now be spared is a public-relations compaign intended to sell civil defense. The P.R program would have included "updating and consolidating consolidat-ing ... printed and audio-visual materials created for dissemination to Jhe general public, and providing a coherent and candid flow of positive information on the program to the media at both the national and local levels, attempting to develop in the various audiences a feeling of confidence and support for the program." JUSTIFIED BAILOUT?: The Federal Fed-eral Deposit Insurance Corp. was soundly censured last year by some members of Congress when it rushed to the rescue of Continental Illinois, the badly managed bank that was once the sixth largest in the nation. We have seen internal memos prepared by federal bank regulators during the Continental crisis that explain why the bank had to be bailed out. Among the reasons: Domestic and international money markets would have been disrupted by the bank's failure because investors would have steered clear of all bank certificates of deposit. Other big banks, which had lent huge sums to Continental, would have suffered severe "withdrawal pains" if the big bank had been allowed to go under. Hundreds of smaller banks that relied on Continental for check-clear- |
